Queer Eyes For The Privileged Eye

Main menu

Category Archives: identity privilege

During my undergrad studies, I had one class in particular that encouraged me and my fellow classmates to question fundamental values such as peace, equality and freedom. Since the professor was a self-proclaimed, fearless feminist who loved a good philosophical debate (Hi, Gun!), I always felt comfortable and safe to make other people question their values and views when debating issues regarding gender identity and sexual orientation.

One day we were discussing gender equality at the societal level and; of course, there were these two guys who mansplained to me the “natural” differences between the sexes after I had explained to them that gender was a social construct and not an inherent human characteristic. The debate kept on going and so they kept telling me I was wrong because women and men are “naturally different”.

What’s tragic though is that, at the end, they told me they called themselves allies to the gender equality movement (because God forbid they called themselves the F-word!) and that we were working towards the same goal.

Hermione in class, eye rolling, like me. Credit: Glee Wiki

Since that hopeless discussion, and in my own journey as a feminist with a passion and curiosity for social justice, I have always wanted to know more about what it really means to be an ally.

Last week I had the opportunity to explore this topic more in depth by facilitating a discussion about “how to be a better ally” in our biweekly Everyday Feminism Team meeting. In the discussion, not only did I learn more about being an ally through the research I had to do, but also through the beautiful and rich ideas my fellow feminists shared with me. I want to share my reflections on the topic here.

But before you read any further I want to say two things. Firstly, a BIG THANKS to those who participated and shared extremely insightful, complex and articulate ideas about their experience as allies and as feminists; and for the support in my first facilitated discussion over Skype. Thanks to Sandra for the opportunity to facilitate the discussion. Secondly, the research used in the discussion is the same research that is used in this blog post and credit will be given where it is due. Most of my research was based on amazing ideas from Jamie Utt, Mia McKenzie from Black Girl Dangerous and articles from Everyday Feminism.

What Does It Mean To Be An Ally?

So, maybe it is because we are genuinely passionate about a certain cause (like the feminist, queer or environmental movements) or because we want to do some good and feel good about it, we have probably said in the past that we support a certain cause or we are an ally to it.And perhaps announcing it to others, or “talking the talk” as some people say, seems like enough for most of us.

But this is not really enacting social change.

We need to actually walk the walk to have some kind of impact in the field of social justice; and to achieve this, we need to ask ourselves, what does it mean to be an ally? Do we even know what an ally is?

Drawing from the works of Jamie Utt and Mia McKenzie, allies are people of identity privilegewho consciously act against the systems that afford them privilege because they are aware of how these systems oppress and marginalise other groups of people in our society.

Being an ally requires daily actions that undermine and challenge the social norms that make up for today’s status quo. Foucault explains how social norms exert disciplinary power on a certain population and how, in turn, this further dichotomises identities. As individuals internalise and condition themselves to act and think in certain ways, some practices, discourses and identities are reproduced and so they are considered ‘normal’ or more ‘acceptable’ than others. This creates dichotomies like normal/abnormal, natural/unnatural, subject/object, privileged/oppressed and so on. As such, those that internalise, act and are born in a circumstance that ‘fits in’ with the norm will benefit from social and identity privileges.

The status quo is maintained because power is relational (which means everyone is an instrument of power) among individuals and institutions in our society. People internalise norms that contribute to this status quo. Since power is literally everywhere, Foucault believed that the status quo and its norms can be changed when people challenge norms and the institutions that reinforce them. I see it as a way to disrupt the current cycle of norms and try to create another one, but that’s just me.

Allies, as instruments of power (in my Foucauldian terms), need to be in a constant battle against these social norms since they oppress certain groups of people while privileging others.The best way to do this, before taking any other step, is to become aware of one’s privilege.

The Two Most Difficult – But Most Important – Tasks Allies Need To Know

This is one of the most difficult tasks that we, as allies, need to fulfil. Checking our privilege entails questioning and analysing how we are advantaged in society by any of our multiple identities. Identities that are considered majoritarian and privileged such as white, male, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied and wealthy are considered the norm; and as norms, they have the power to exclude those that do not fit in.

As Jamie Utt explains, as allies, the only way to change these norms is to purposely work against them. Knowing the way in which privilege advantages us will allow us to understand our placement in our society’s power structures, clarifying the way in which we can act in solidarity with others. This is an important realisation since privilege hides itself from the eyes of its beholder as the privileged is the norm.

I don’t see race – I don’t see my privilege. Credit: Feministwire.

A lot of people feel shame and privilege guilt when checking their privilege for the first time. This is okay, I went through it myself. It is pretty overwhelming to realise how one’s identities can contribute to the oppression of others. But we need to move past this. If we really want to be a part of social change, we need to act. We need to accept that we can’t really give our privileges away and feeling guilty and shameful only paralyses us in a state of inaction, which contributes to oppression by maintaining the status quo!

This is NOT what we want as allies.

To move past privilege guilt I extremely recommend this article by Jamie Utt, but I think it is important to add these couple of things here:

To prevent the powerlessness that comes with (un)learning your privilege and to move past privilege guilt, keep in mind that it’s not your fault you have certain privileged identities. It’s pointless to feel guilty about something you can’t really change.

However, you should feel guilty if you have checked your privileged and just sit there feeling bad instead of taking some action.

You shouldn’t guilt-trip yourself over being heterosexual, or being white, or being wealthy. You are not a bad person. Oppression is systemic, not individual; but it is reproduced with individual actions. You should, however, become conscious about your place within society’s power structures and the impact of your actions. This way you can devise ways to become a more inclusive and empathetic person.

Again, understand your role in oppression. Quoting Jamie, “understanding the fundamental ways in which I, as a person of privilege, collude with oppression every day, empowers me to act”.

In desperation, my mentor Mark Spokes always referred me to the Serenity Prayer. I am not religious, but it makes you reflect a lot about what you can realistically change with your actions so you invest your energy where it is necessary. Burn-out effect is not fun.

As Frances E. Kendall says, question your privilege by asking questions such as “what does it mean to be ________ in this situation?”, “if I were to be _________, would I be listened to?”.

This leads me to the second most difficult task that we need to perform as allies: toreally listen.

Listening as an ally is more than just listening to one person of a marginalised group and calling it a day, because this person does not represent the stories of every person of that group. Listening as an ally is more than being friends with a person of a marginalised group and say I’m not homophobic or racist or classist because I have a friend from a certain group.

Listening is just another way of challenging current relations of power. As Jamie Utt explains here, having identity privilege comes with the assumption that our worldview is (or at least should be) right, simply because we are the norm. And refusing to listen to those who are different from us is just another mechanism of silencing them. This silencing is done to remain in power and this silencing reproduces oppression.

If we really listen,we are opening our hearts and minds to someone else’s perception of the world. We are recognising their full humanity by acknowledging that their voice, even if different from ours, is equally valid and worthy of listening.

Listening sometimes means leaving one’s ego behind and accepting that the role of an ally is not to be the centre of the movement or cause they support, but to facilitate and respect safe spaces for marginalised voices to be heard. Most importantly, listening as an ally is to know that an ally’s place isnot to talk over or act on behalfof people from a marginalised group, it is merely to recognise the power of their voice and their full humanity.

Listening means to be genuinely open to learn the unique experiences of a person and to unlearn preconceived assumptions, negative and positive stereotypes about a certain group of people.

Listening means learning to accept that we will be called out on our privilege and that we need to apologise for it. We become better allies by trying to do better after someone called out our privilege. If we make a mistake, we need to apologise for it and truly listen. We don’t need to get defensive about it because it is most likely that we messed up. It is part of our learning experience on listening to other voices.

To be able to really listen, sometimes we need to shut up. Plain and simple, like Mia McKenzie says here. Once we recognise how our voice as privileged people has so much importance in our society, we need to shut up to give other voices the space they need to be heard.

Other Words of Wisdom

To facilitate the process of listening and to always keep our privilege checked, as allies, we should never take credit for the work of people from marginalised groups as our own. Those people have tried for a long time to get their voices heard, it is not fair for us to take advantage of our privilege and promote their ideas as our own. This only reinforces oppression as the privileged come up with all the solutions for those who are marginalised (Ugh). Those are not your words or actions, so why would you say they are?

As allies, we need to know that we are not the centre of the movement or cause we support. It is not about us. It is not about how we feel. It is not about how this can be convenient for us. It is about furthering the reach of voices that have been traditionally marginalised and inspiring others to take action towards a more just society. It is about supporting the work and the voices of those you are allies with, not about being the spotlight and centre of attention.

As allies we do not proclaim ourselves as allies. This is just weird. As Jamie points out here, those who we want to ally ourselves with must make that call based on how much they can trust us as allies. And, we can’t just say “oh, we are allies to this” because being an ally is about acting, not about our intentions (because intentions don’t have impact) and certainly not about the fanciness of the title. We are always becoming allies through our actions.

We must know that we can’t just pick and choose when it is convenient for us to act as allies. This is taking advantage of our privilege since we canchoose when to act or not act against oppression. As Jamie Utt points out here, people of marginalised oppression do not take breaks from being oppressed!

This is something I personally struggle with because sometimes I feel it’s going to be a lost-battle trying to make a point about racism or homophobia with some of my friends (or even extended family!). And even though I am all for getting to know my energy levels to choose when to deal with this stuff, I want to have more courage and engage in these situations more often. Courage is important because the most effective way of being an ally is to to talk with people that share our identity privilege about the struggle of marginalised groups. This might offend the people with privilege since they might have never been called out before! I did this when I called out a friend of mine for being transphoic. As a cis woman, I tried to help my cis friend to understand why transgender is just another gender in the gender spectrum.

As allies, we need to know that we are in a never-ending learning process. We need to be on top of our game and to do this we need to listen and we need to read. Yes, we need to read and educate ourselves. We need to inform ourselves about current affairs and the history behind oppression (capitalism, anyone?). We need to know about patriarchy and, more specifically,kyriarchy.

It is necessary that we educate ourselves about intersectionality. This way we can understand how people experience the intersections of oppression and privilege in different ways and how this disproportionately affects others. For example, within the feminist movement, White Feminists need to learn how to be better allies to Women Of Colour by amplifying their voices and their work. As my fellow feminist Sarah Glassman pointed out in our discussion last week, we need to learn how to be better allies within our movements. Within the LGBTQIA+ movement, class-privileged white gay males are the population with more advantages and there needs to be space for recognition and support for other individuals that identify as trans*, bisexual or asexual, for example. There are power dynamics in every circumstance we find ourselves in, and we always need to think how to be better allies in such situations.

Mainstream Feminism – Credit: Tumblr.

This post is long enough already (Oops!), I just recommend reflecting about the groups you want to ally yourself to and how small actions can have a big impact. For example, asking for the preferred pronoun of a person, becoming aware of the language we use and how words can hurt people, what media we are consuming and the need to expand it or not to mansplain are good places to start, depending on your identity.

So yeah, as you can see, being an ally is definitely tougher than it looks! Please, don’t feel overwhelmed or disappointed because you realised you’ve made some mistakes. This post was made to encourage everyone to keep learning and keep improving every day because allies do play a big role in social justice movements. Never forget that! 😉

After exploring the reasons why we have never heard about queer sex-ed in our schools in last week’s post, it’s time to imagine what queer sex education would look like.

And to imagine what queer sex-ed would look like, we need to keep in mind these four fundamental things as the foundation for our new sex-ed:

Gender Is Not Binary, Gender Is A Spectrum:

Gender Identity is a person’s inner sense of self. This can be as man, woman, something other entirely or something in between. There are people, whose sex doesn’t match their gender identity, who identify as transgender.

Gender is a social construction because there’s nothing really natural, inherent or essential in a person’s gender identity. Society has constructed gender as a set of norms, roles and scripted expectations that determine how people within the gender binary (man and woman) should look, think and behave.

Our job as educators is to break the gender binary and construct gender as a spectrum. This means that a person’s gender is not about either/or, but about both/and. No one on this planet is made to perfectly fix society’s boxes of “men” and “women” and these categories are not in opposition against each other. Men have feminine traits in their character and vice versa. There are trans* folk who feel that they don’t belong to any gender or have traits of both of them and feel somewhere in between. There are people that feel another non-binary gender in its entirety. There are people that feel they have no gender identity at all.

There are many sexual orientations! Think about all the labels people can choose to identify with: gay, lesbian, straight, bisexual, asexual, pansexual, queer or no label at all. We know sexual orientation is very diverse and, as such, it is not binary.

Sexual orientation is the sexual or romantic attraction (yes, they are separate things) a person feels towards other people. Much like gender, sexual orientation has nothing natural, essential or inherent about it. In fact, it only became an identity marker around the 19th century (thanks for the info, Foucault).

This attraction felt by people towards others is just pure desire and desire cannot be regulated or controlled by social norms. So, a person’s sexual orientation cannot strictly fit society’s boxes of “heterosexual”, “gay”, “bisexual” and so on. Identity is fluid and can change overtime, but this is not to say that everyone’s sexual orientation changes. Some people know they are gay and identify that way their whole life just as others ‘come out’ many times in their lifetime. It really depends on the individual and his, her or hir past experiences.

Just like gender identity and sexual orientation, biological sex is a spectrum. Some people are born with genitalia that is not exclusively male or female and/or with chromosomes other than XX and XY. Intersex people are born with biological traits that do not fit the sex binary of male/female and these traits can be chromosomal, hormonal and/or physical.

Our society tries to normalise these bodies through corrective surgery from the moment they are born. This is because our society wants to maintain the (binary and limiting) status quo regarding sex, gender and sexual orientation. All this is to preserve the privilege and power of those that are cis-het people with normative genitalia (because they are in power and are wary of people that are different taking their power… duh) *rolls eyes*

All these categories have one thing in common. This one thing is what our current sex-ed and society wants us to ignore: sex, gender identity and sexual orientation are not binary, black and white categorical boxes.These identity markers are diverse spectrums.

Sex, gender identity and sexual orientation do not determine each other, but are extremely linked and influence one another.

And guess what? All of these identities exist, all of them deserve respect and recognition and all of them are normal. So let’s start teaching sex, gender and sexuality as they really are and not as we’ve been conditioned to think they should be.

So what does this look like?

If queer sex-ed has as its foundation the four criteria explained above, it is automatically more inclusive and a more accurate representation of what sex, gender identity and sexuality really are. This means queer sex-ed needs to include traditionally marginalised voices within the queer movement like trans*, genderqueer, asexual, bisexual and intersex.

There are no assumptions of anyone’s gender identity, sex or sexual orientation and this means two things. Firstly, this creates a safe space and opens the conversation about how everyone feels and identifies, without being judged or considered an outcast. Secondly, the class needs to be taught accordingly, queering pedagogical methods (like using examples of queer people, asking for preferred pronouns, diversifying the literature to include queer voices).

Queer sex-ed should be leading the way towards a pleasure-based sexual health education. This means that, unlike abstinence-only education that focuses on babies and the (false) consequences of sex and contraception, queer sex-ed should be about learning to safely pleasure oneself and one’s partner. And this pleasuring should be without boundaries, which means acknowledging every gender identity and sexual orientation.

Queer sex-ed should be sex positive. Sex positive goddess Laci Green explains that sex positivity is about embracing one’s sexuality (no matter what that is) in a safe and consensual way. Sex positivity goes against the fear, shame and judgement that sex-negative societal attitudes seek to reproduce (mostly through sex-negative abstinence only ed), like slut-shaming. Sex-positivity calls for the freedom to express one’s sexuality alone or with a partner (or many!). But most importantly, sex positivity emphasises the need for consensual acts and advocates that only yes means yes. Important to say that ALL sexual relationships need consent, regardless of the genders and sexual orientations involved.

And last but not least, queer sex-ed should be body-positive. This means that part of sexuality education needs to focus on developing a positive and healthy relationship with our body image, regardless of gender and sexual orientation. This should focus on building acceptance, respect, love and admiration for our own bodies no matter what size we are. Also, to broaden our understanding of diversity, body-positivity fights against ableism, since this is another axis of oppression in relation to bodies in our society.

Surprisingly, there are a few organisations and academics (like me in the future, just saying) that are developing general guidelines and building curricula to queer sex-ed or make sex-ed queer. And this is not only regarding sex-ed, but to queer education in general. These awesome people have realised that in regular sex-ed, or even worse, abstinence-only education, queer sexualities and non-conforming gender identities are not only invisible, but they are considered threatening and immoral.

Think of the stigma, depression, loneliness, anxiety, sadness, bullying and other horrible consequences queer and trans* kids face in school (if not all of their lives) because they are taught that their experiences are considered unworthy of acknowledgement (to say the least!).

Credit: US Teen Culture

Beyond including facts and figures about the LGBTQIA+ community, queering sex-ed is about challenging the status quo. This surely sounds like big words to you, but it is indeed a big thing to celebrate. Queering sex-ed is about pushing boundaries and re-imagining the world we live in. And in doing so, paving the way towards a more equal and fair society.

Well, basically because it is important that members of a marginalised community have the right to know how to have safe and consensual sex and be represented in the school curricula: LGBTQIA+ YOUTH. This type of education validates their experience in a world that constantly tells them that they are wrong and they shouldn’t exist.

This type of education promotes and promises LGBTQIA+ youth a better relationship and understanding of their identities, their bodies and their desires. They will learn how to have safe sex and enjoy it. They will learn how to prevent STIs and HIV. They will learn that consent is necessary in all kinds of relationship. They will learn that they too can form families.

Queer sex-ed not only benefits LGBTQIA+ students but everyone. This means that cisnormative heterosexual students can learn to accept and respect people that identify differently. This means that this cis-het students will learn about their identity privilege and will be encouraged to engage in active self-reflection about their role in oppressive structures.

Queer sex-ed dismantles the taboo status regarding sexual education (queer or not, to be honest!). It helps to see other identities and orientations as normal and helps dissolve the tension and fear of coming out. It will, by default, decrease the homophobic and transphobic bullying that is so rampant in our schools.

Queer sex-ed teaches gender identity, sexual orientation and biological sex as they actually are and not how we have been conditioned to think they should be.

So, I don’t know about you, but this sounds like my cup of tea 😉 I love me some queer sex-ed.

If you have any suggestions or ideas that you think should be included in queer sex-ed, please feel free to post them in the comment section 🙂